Monday August 20, 2001
Gays, Lesbians and the Census
Philly.com says: “If there can be winners in a census count, this year it’s gays and lesbians. Across Philadelphia and around the nation, same-sex couples are celebrating the results of a census that establishes them as a potential political force. And they are crediting their new visibility — everywhere from city neighborhoods to rural towns beyond the suburbs — in part to a campaign last year to “Out the Census.”
Check your state’s gay census totals here.
“We’re a family,” said Philadelphian Dorena Kearney of herself and her female partner. “We’re raising children, and we’re a family, and I wanted to be represented in that census.”
Kearney, a member of the mayor’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Advisory Board, said she wanted to make people more aware “that every household is not your typical household.”
The Seattle Times says Seattle is near the top of Gay Cities in America. “One out of every 21 couples living together in Seattle is homosexual, according to new census figures that indicate the city has one of the nation’s highest percentages of gay households.”
Here’s an additional story on the census from The San Francisco Chronicle.
Kill the Clichés
Why not spend 30 seconds of your Morning Meeting talking about grammar and word usage. Here is a good place to start: the Cliché of the Day site.
Producer Abe Rosenberg has a wonderful collection of clichés which he uses in his writing workshops. See his list: http://www.newswriting.com/groaners.htm
Cool Kindergarten Book, Hot Back-To-School Item
Climbing the bestseller list is a little paperback with a potential market of several million: kindergartners.
The Night Before Kindergarten by Natasha Wing, art by Julie Durrell (Grosset & Dunlap, $3.49) arrived in stores in July to capture that brief window of sales days before school starts. It’s currently No. 136 on the list.
USA Today says, “Wing, who has written a series of children’s books based on the Clement C. Moore Christmas poem, talked with friends, teachers and kids about the first day of kindergarten and that peculiar mix of anxiety and excitement.”
She came upon this universal truth: Parents are very emotional. Which explains why this book ends with: “The children all waved from the door of the school. ‘Don’t cry, Mom and Dad, kindergarten is cool!’ ”
Here is another really nice book for kindergartners.
How Important is Kindergarten?
Tracking 22,000 students, a U.S. Education Department study shows for the first time what children know when they enter school and how that knowledge is shaped through early school years. The study shows that at the end of kindergarten, five times as many children could do simple addition and subtraction as a year earlier. Children who could recognize letters of the alphabet rose from 65 percent to 94 percent. And those who could recognize simple words rose from two to 13 percent.